Brian Eno: “It is pathetic to make music that sounds like someone else”
While talking on Zoom, Brian Eno draws on a sheet: “It helps me to concentrate”, he explains at a certain point. When Beatie Wolfe, however, often eats pieces of cake: with one of the greatest musicians and producers of the last decades nothing is ever “normal”. This sort of interview/press conference is not with few international journalists who lasts not the rectory half an hour but almost two hours, with few questions and very long and articulated answers. which go beyond promotion and turn into one long reflection on songs, music and role of art.
Also the music of the two albums “Lateral “and” Luminal “, coming out on June 6thit is far from normal. One is an ambient disc, with a single suite of over an hour (but divided into different movements depending on the format). The other is an album of songs, sung by Beatie Wolfe – but with a “open” shape and structure.
The two met by talking about the environment, in a conference at the Sxsw on art and climate. Then they found themselves in London, exhibiting their works in art galleries. So they entered the studio, the legendary one of Brian Eno who acts as a background to the chat on Zoom: “We started without any goal, just playing,” says Eno. “None of us two think that the time spent playing without a purpose is lost time.”
“Luminal” is “dream music”, the second “spatial music” – “But did we really call them like this?”, I miss Eno at some point. “But let’s not talk about the old Eno”, It is recommended. “I don’t care to tell what I did in the past.” So we talk about the present and the recent past, in which Eno has returned several times to the form-chanzone, in “Foreverandevernomore”, in “Secret Life” with his protégé Fred Again and now in “Luminal”.
Another way of understanding the song
In the 11 tracks of “Luminal”, Eno and Wolfe do not follow the canonical rules of the form-chanzone: They are pieces that aim for moods more than telling stories. “I don’t care the narrative songs,” says Eno. “Those who say: this happened, then this other. I want to build an emotional space”. Wolfe adds: “We built these songs from the inside to the outside, starting from a sound, from a feeling, and letting things develop on their own”.
Although has produced some of the most successful bands of the last decades, from U2 (with which it has returned to the studio) to the ColdplayEno stresses that their approach to this album is radically opposite to that of Hit’s “professional” writing: “If you want to write a top 40 song you already have in mind what to do: do not exceed three and a half minutes, have a beat, follow precise rules. We do the exact opposite: we wonder: how do we feel today? We take the tools and see what happens, without any restriction”.
This led to two albums with deliberately unstructured music, even when there are songs: “The technical term is anti-teleological: they must not go anywhere. They remain, expand, live”.
The texts also follow this logic: “We don’t write texts to say something, it’s not that I want to send a message. The fact is that When you write songs, people always think they are your expression. But Harold Pintter at the theater did not stage himself. As Bowie did, as David Byrne does: they play characters, That in songs say things that do not necessarily represent themselves. In songs we often write words that do not have a meaning, but that are consistent with the sensations we try to tell “.
He adds Wolfe: “The stories are there, every now and then. But we try not to be literal, didactic. Life is made of ambiguity, our feelings are often ambiguous and the songs allow you to explore this space made of confusions and contradictions”.
Art was born from the chaos and the refusal of the schemes
Eno and Wolfe love the “dirt”, the chaos that moves away from the series structures. “Why does everything have to be finished, quantized?” Wolfe wonders. “Crepes are where humanity lives. Technology is likely to remove all this from music. ” Eno raise: “I come from painting. There we are used to a variety of texture. In music instead There are thousands of plugins designed to play your disc exactly like someone else’s, and it’s pathetic. I love plugins, but only when I use them contrary to how they are designed. Only in this way do they become interesting. I don’t like music too clean. We love disorder. The casino is life “.
Infinitely long, or very short music
Apparently without form music, which dilates and compresses the time, going from 65 minutes of “Lateral” to the 3 minutes of the songs of “Luminal”. Album as spaces of slowness and contemplative listening: “Money lies in speed: if you want to earn, do something that people consume quickly. But there are also contrary tendencies, more and more people are looking for slow experiences“, Eno reflects:“ Today there are TV programs where nothing happens for two hours, or channels that broadcast the journey of a train in real time, followed by hundreds of thousands of people. There is a growing need for slowness “.
Eno and Wolfe say that for these albums they did the opposite of the speed: they slowed down everything they wrote. Why One of the greatest musical revolutions of the last decades is linked to the possibility of manipulating time and sound: “When I was young, you couldn’t. The time of music was scrolled and now we can do Very short music, like the 15 seconds of Tiktok, or music with an infinite duration, such as the compositions that self -gone and never end. Technology allows us to manipulate the sound, the stamp of each instrument. But it also allows you to stretch, slow down, dilate: I have always wanted to make music without beginning and without end, something that simply is, like a landscape or a horizon “, says, evoking the dawn of ambient music, designed as music is of the background, but also interesting to listen to actively.
“Time is a new medium for those who make music. It is no longer only the structure that contains the work, but a creative tool. And I like to remember that slow is beautiful. Even if nothing happens, the same is fine. The problem is that the media want exactly the opposite: more events, more cuts, more noise, more distractions “.
This approach is reflected directly in the processing of the two albums: “We often recorded something, then we reproduced it at a much slower speed. So the sound opened, became warmer, deeper. Everything changed. When composing, you have the instinct to add, but when you listen to you want space. And that type of space finds it over time”.
Wolfe confirms: “We used very few tools, trying to do more with less. This is also a way to give importance to time and sound. Intent, not frugality”.
Art changes the world, but without slogans
At the heart of “Luminal” and “Lateral” there is the search for feelings, even those who have no name. “In English we have very few words to describe emotions”, Wolfe notes. “In other languages there are wonderful words,” they explain, citing for example the Italian expression “move”.
For Eno, “Art serves to make something experience. It does not necessarily transmit information, it is not propaganda. But it is the place where we enter other worlds, we experience, we evaluate, and from which our actions start“Even when we do not immediately understand what we are feeling:” The feeling comes before thought, and often even after. Music helps you feel before understanding. “
The political dimension is not absent, but it is not direct. “I don’t know how to write songs or manifest music. I don’t think it’s what really changes things. But I think art changes the world. Only he does it differently“, says Eno.” Art is like fertile ground: it is not the action itself, but creates the conditions for action “.
And Eno is one who acts on several fronts: he has just asked Microsoft not to use his famous jingle for Windows, because the company provides artificial intelligence systems to the Israeli army, used to bomb Gaza civilians. “But nobody replied,” he says.
Eno closes with a metaphor: “If you want a farm to bear fruit, you have to take care of the soil. Those who have no room for art has arid terrain. Art makes the ground of our minds fertile, changes things, but slowly. It makes us more suitable to face uncertainties. And also to play and celebrate, because it teaches us to let go of control “.
